Hi, I'm CrazyDuke, a Slashdot anti-U.S. troll, and I know that anti-government rants are really popular on Slashdot, so I'm going to try to make a witty statement about the Supreme court being owned by corporate interests, even though I have not ever actually read the Constitution or seen how the court works.
How is the Supreme Court swayed by corporate dollars? Short of outright bribery, I am not aware of any vehicle for this. It's not like the justices have to run a re-election campaign in a couple of years. That's the whole point of appointing them for life. Once they're in, they don't owe anybody anything. They are already sitting on the highest court, so they don't have to impress anyone to get another appointment. They don't have to worry about re-election, so no need for financing a campaign. The justices really have no incentive to take a bribe. The prestige of sitting on the Supreme Court far outweighs such a temporary monetary gain, and the justice taking bribes would be quickly impeached once it was discovered. It's a totally brilliant arrangement: A small group of people with very limited power, but extrememly powerful within their limits. They have no original jurisdiction and no capacity to originate law, so they can't take the country by tyrrany, but once something hits their docket and they agree to hear it, their decisions are absolutely binding. There is no one else to appeal to. Since they are basically immune from any kind of external power, they can afford to vote against the most powerful politicians or corporations if they feel it is necessary (granted, they sometimes are swayed more by the potential for setting precedents than the actual merits of a specific case, but even in those cases, they decide to set or not set precdent according to their consciences). The whole point is to provide a final sanity check where the powerful can be stopped when abusing their power. I am no fan of the copyright extension, but if it is upheld, I do not doubt it will be because five of the justices really believe that was the right thing to do. Your smug comment about corporate dollars was ridiculous.
Yes, there was no formal declaration in 1990 for Iraq, but the circumstances were different too. In 1990, we were playing "Good Neighbor" and "World Citizen." Last September, we were hurting from a direct attack on us, we were pissed off, we weren't exactly in "turn the other cheek" mode, and we had the kind of solidarity (at least temporarily) that made conditions ripe for a war declaration. It would have passed both houses of Congress with little to no dissent because then the congress people would be able to say "See, we're doing something about it."
I know that it's pure speculation, but I offer it as my opinion that a war declaration would have served to galvanize our collective resolve, and would have kept it strong for a long time. For four years in WWII, everybody knew who the bad guys were, and we knew what we were trying to do (push them back into their own borders). People stood behind the effort through a long and difficult time (even the folks at home were living with rations). As it is now, we have an enemy that is difficult to even label, much less "contain" in any kind of border. All we know is that "they" (the terrorists) hate us and that we wouldn't mind killing "them" to the last man. But, since there's no nation to call the enemy, we're already bickering from within about "is this country one of "them" or not? I think everybody in Washington, D.C. would take a real country with a real declaration of war right now.
I don't have time to share files, so I don't and I only use open source software, with a few proprietary items that are licensed.
In which case, they will probably just leave you alone. If they don't leave you alone, then they've just given you some very good ammunition for taking this law down in a court (if it even passes the congress, which seems kind of doubtful).
While it is true that no war has technically been declared, that is due more to the fact that there is no sovereign state to declare war against. If there were such a state, I do not doubt that a formal declaration of war would have been made around Sept. 12 (similar to what happened after Pearl Harbor). Even in the absence of a technical declaration of war, there is no doubt that we are presently in a time of war. There was plenty of evidence that Jose Padilla was giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy, which qualifies him as an enemy combatant. So, I hate to burst everybody's alarmist bubble, because, after all, this is Slashdot where the sheep mentality happens to be pro-Linux and anti-U.S. rather than the other way around, but unless you are using your P2P network as a means of actively distributing intelligence and training material to Al Qaeda operatives around the world, you are not going to get tossed into prison and held indefinitely for using the P2P client of the month. Maybe Hilary Rosen would like for it to be that way, but it would be political suicide for any congress person to support her, so it will never happen. As it is, even this bill that would allow RIAA members to DoS your P2P network is being met very critically.
If you decide to aid the enemy in a time of war, especially if there is abundant evidence that you are doing so, special rules apply. It's one of those short-term provisions that are necessary to successfully prosecute a war and keep Sept. 11 from repeating itself. Just like other such provisions in the past, this will pass once the war is over. I for one do not see why there is so much sympathy for Jose Padilla on Slashdot. He made himself an enemy of the very Constitution everybody here wants to say they love so much. If he had his way and his little extremist Muslim buddies took over, you wouldn't so much as have the right to complain about it on Slashdot.
I understand your idea about a proprietary interface on top of the Linux kernel. There are lots of proprietary programs for Linux, some of which sell in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars range and are anything but open. However, that still leaves the problem that having an OS based on the Linux kernel still makes it much easier for a third party to create a portability solution, and MS knows that portability is not their friend.
Bah! Real men create their netlists and models in vi and then run them with raw Berkley spice. Also, if you're not doing circuit layout by hand with a ruler and a fine point pencil, you're not earning your pay =)
However, if OrCad wanted to just go ahead and port Capture, PSpice and Layout Plus to Linux, I have a, uh, friend who might use them, so I guess it wouldn't be too bad.
On a serious note, The MathWorks deserves kudos for having a fully featured version of Matlab available for Linux. Also, NI has a Linux version of LabVIEW, which is good for Q&D GUI design besides just instrumentation. So, even when there is no good open source competitor, some companies are starting to come around and port their stuff to Linux on their own.
In my opinion, there is one major reason MS has not done this (and I don't think they will any time in the near future). The scenario that you suggest where they hijack the Linux kernel and close it up is illegal, even for them. It would not be difficult for Linus to win a court battle against them with such a flagrant breach of licensing terms. Since the kernel would have to stay the same, it would make it much easier for people to create an emulation layer that would make software for "MS Winux(tm)" -- or whatever they call it -- run on other Linux distros (the Wine people have already done an impressive job of making many Windows programs run sort of decently, and that's without a common kernel). So, anybody who does not want to mess with the stupid MS Winux mess could just get a copy of MS Office and whatever other apps they need and run it on their stock Linux. Since the core of the MS monopoly is tying everything so tightly to the OS that it is not practical to migrate to other platforms, the last thing they want to do is make it easier for people to create migration solutions. Hence, no MS Winux.
I'd bet they've already ported all of their major software apps to various UNIX and LINUX variants just for research, and have probably rolled a LINUX distro or two just for grins. That doesn't mean any of it will ever see the light of day outside of Redmond.
Ahhh..., but large leaps are made of hundreds or thousands of tiny ones. Look at the gun laws in this country, They can't do it all at once so they just continue to crank, and crank, crank until you no room to move.
Can't argue with you on that one. The Second Ammendment has pretty well been dismantled. However, I don't think the analogy is relevant. Gun control laws have, from the first, been specifically targeted at limiting the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Some may disagree, but I think that child pornography laws are aimed squarely at protecting children.
Kiddie porn is by no means acceptable, but neither is turning the service I pay money to subscribe to into my mom.
It has nothing to do with being your mom. For pretty much any other content on the web, you can decide for yourself and for your family whether it is acceptable, but child pornography has the special distinction of being so utterly perverse and harmful to society that, collectively morally bankrupt though we are, we have decided as a nation (and PA has decided as a state) that it should be illegal. Why, then, is it such a big deal to block it? I don't think I've seen one response to this story openly condoning child pornography. If it's so bad, why are we bothered that it's blocked? Is anybody bothered that ISPs block SPAM? If there is absolutely no good that could come from us having access to child pornography, what have we lost by not having access to it? Yes, I know everybody wants to say it's about the "principle" of censorship, but like I said, if we were really that concerned about censorship, we'd demand that the ISPs forward the SPAM to us too. I suspect that most of the people here are just worried that something may come of this that blocks their free and unfettered access to other kinds of pornography. Know what? That won't alarm me either. The application of free speech to protect pornography of any kind is, in my opinion, a major departure from the inent of the First Ammendment (rather, I believe that the First Ammendment gives you the right to argue the intrinsic worth and benefit of pornography or anything else on its own merits and thereby try your best to convince others that it should be freely accessible to all -- not because it is protected "speech," but because it is more beneficial to society than detrimental). When a web site is shut down strictly for voicing dissatisfaction with the government, condoning a controversial political opinion or even for expressing favor for Al Qaeda (short of being used as a front to actually disseminate information to operatives and organize terrorist strikes) -- as soon as that happens, I will promptly panic with the rest of you. Until that happens, the government is working within its Constitutional bounds, and I will continue to support the laws I do like and work within the system to change the laws I don't like. And, of course, post to Slashdot, though I don't know why.
Child pornography, of course, is a terrible, terrible thing, but the precedent that this sets is equally terrible (although in a completely different way.)
Really? A precedent that allows an AG to instruct an ISP to restrict access to content that his state has legally ruled unacceptable, and that the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled is not protected by the First Ammendment is as dangerous as dirty old men taking pictures of themselves molesting children and spreading that around to feed the twisted lusts of other dirty old men so they can get great ideas on how to prey on helpless children who will be scarred for the remainder of their lives? I guess I'm not seeing the correlation of magnitude.
If they're doing this, why can't they start arresting and prosecuting Verizon and AT&T for allowing USA-based Al-Queda to talk back and forth?
Umm, because if you read the article, you'll see that they're not arresting or charging WorldCom or any of its employees or even holding them responsible for the content. They simply instructed WorldCom to stop serving the content to their customers in Pennsylvania, since the content is illegal in Pennsylvania.
Why don't they go after the sites themselves?
No doubt if the sites were hosted and/or created in Pennsylvania they would. I assume that they are not (details in the story are sparse -- really, it's quite short; you ought to give it a read), so the best they can do is prevent them from being viewed in Pennsylvania. The logical way to do this is to instruct the ISP to not serve those sites to customers in Pennsylvania.
Honestly, if people would take a peek at what the actual "news" is before getting all hot and bothered off the cuff because they saw the words "blocking" and "pornography" in the same sentence on Slashdot, they'd see this is not that big a deal. It just sounded nice and sensational because it involved censorship, WorldCom and porn, all in one story. If you read it though, Penn. ISPs have already similarly blocked some 200 other sites (I'm guessing voluntarily, since this is the first that has generated a court order), so it's really not even news at all. If WorldCom defied the order and had a big standoff with the Penn. AG, that might be news, but I can't see any evidence that will happen, or even that anybody suspects it will happen.
Yeah, or it could cause the end of the civilization as we know it!!!
Or it could cause very little precedent to be set at all. WorldCom is not being punished or held liable for the content. They were simply told, "This content is illegal in Pennsylvania, so we are instructing you not to serve it to your Pennsylvania customers." If you don't like that move to another country, because child pornography has collected a strong body of precedent against itself. It is not constitutionally protected, so we should not be surprised to see it restricted. It would take a huge legal leap to go from this to "Shut down the homepage of the Democratic National Convention because they published an article critical of the President."
Was your wife teaching LD kids through an inclusion program?
Technically, no, but she sure felt like it sometimes. Like I said, it was a very low-income school, so many of the parents were not educated (she had one mother who was trying to help her third grader with homework call our home because she couldn't figure out how to do it -- we're talking very basic division problems here). Also, for many of them, English was not a first language for them and/or their parents, so I don't even get her started on the inability of these eight-year-olds to form a simple sentence on paper. The real reason for the touch math, as I said before, was that their previous teachers were just too lazy to be bothered to teach them to add in their heads.
My wife taught 3rd grade, and she drilled those kids with the multiplication tables so hard that they were bleeding products by the end of the year. It was her first year teaching, and she was pissed that the previous teachers had taught the kids all of these stupid short-cuts and memory tricks. Her biggest pet peeve was "touch math." The kids learned to touch each number in certain places a certain number of times, so to add 5 + 7, they would touch the "5" five times and the "7" seven times as they counted up to 12. She was just about ready to quit when she had a girl up at the board and wrote "7 + 0" for the girl to solve. The girl proceeded to count to seven while she touched the "7" seven times, then stared at the "0," utterly confounded, and was unable to complete the problem. When she started teaching them multiplication, they tried to adapt touch math to that. To solve 2x3, they would touch the "2" twice, and then repeat three times. That's when she started giving them verbal quizzes almost daily, in which she would shoot off about 25 multiplication problems, and give the students approximately 3 seconds to solve each before moving on. They learned pretty fast that it's a lot easier to learn 7x9 = 63 than to try to touch the "7" seven times and repeat nine times in three seconds. She graded the quizzes and returned them too. When the kids realized they were sinking, most of them just got off of their lazy butts and learned their multiplication tables. It may seem harsh, but it's exactly what those kids needed. They had had lazy teachers before, and most of them came from homes where laziness was a way of life and education was not exactly a priority (this was a pretty poor school). There were a very few for whom the multiplication tables were genuinely beyond their mental capacity, and they will probably never know them, but most of them got it together and learned something.
This would be a brilliant random number generator for generating encryption keys like the article was talking about... until some evil genius figured out a diabolical way to spoof a computer into thinking it was some date/time other than the true date/time. Fortunately, I think that, technologically, we are a long, long way from that.
The problem with this solution, like any software solution, is its reliance on an external environment, which can be "loaded" one way or another. This is very bad for cryptography, because it means that your results can be manipulated. As has been said by others in this discussion, a software algorithm is by nature deterministic, so the same combination of inputs will always yield the same results. If you find a way to reproduce the inputs, then you can reproduce the results exactly. The other problem with this approach is that it relies on being able to "randomly" select a search engine, a web page and a word. Where do you get the random numbers you will need to decide which search engine, web page and word to use?
I see a lot of people treating acetaminophen and ibuprofen as the same in the comments. I'm no doctor, but just in my personal experience, I find ibuprofen vastly more effective for me. I believe that acetaminophen (Tylenol) is a pain blocker, where ibuprofen is more an anti-inflammatory. Since a lot of my headaches and other pains have to do with lack of sleep, tense nerves and sinus infection (I'm a student, work full time and have pretty harsh seasonal allergies), ibuprofen works wonders. I can feel the nerves relaxing after I take the stuff. Tylenol doesn't do much for me, though I hear it is more effective as an actual pain blocker. Of course, like I said before, IANAD.
Man, you are seriously bleeding edge, aren't you! I like to stick to the boring old 2.4.x stable tree, but each to his own, I guess. Is 4.x the kernel series that includes support for USB 3 and Firewire 6? I hear it also has Duke Nukem Forever available as a loadable module (try "modprobe duke" and let me know what comes up).
drag and drop elements, then connect them up with lines
LabVIEW is exactly this, and is a combination of ease and pain. LabVIEW makes it very easy to create a software interface to instruments connected to your computer, and has some nice uses in fast prototyping of UI's and creating visual types of models. However, it is absolutely painful to do any real programming in LabVIEW. If I need to solve complex mathematical problems, including parsing of an input file and formatting of an output file, I'll take FORTRAN or C over LabVIEW any day.
Have accurate information before you correct somebody. The Kilogram is indeed the SI unit for mass. The "standard" is a metal cylinder (I forget which kind of metal) that weighs, by definition, exactly 1 Kg. Think about SI units. What's a Newton? A kg*m/s^2, not 1000 g*m/s^2. Sorry, you lose.
It's also a stupid argument, since most of those who make it claim to hate the "tripe" pushed by members of RIAA. Yes, the latest Brittney Spears CD may only have one or two songs that are "good" (if your definition of "good" aligns with a 13 year-old girl's definition of "lots of air time on the local "HOT 10x.x-FM, the Home of Today's Best Music"). However, I found a band called The Muckrakers on mp3.com, and I bought their CD, and I actually like almost every song on the CD. Do you own U2's War album? Sure, "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day" get played occasionally on the 80's stations, but those are not the only good songs on the album (in fact, in my opinion, they are not even the best songs on the album). Same goes for The Joshua Tree. I've never heard "Bullet the Blue Sky" on the radio, because it is less palatable to the masses than "With or Without You," but it is a great song. How about The Smashing Pumpkins? "Disarm" and "Today" were clearly the only good songs off of Siamese Dream, right? (and between two CDs of Mellon Collie, there were maybe 3-4 that got air time). What I'm getting at is, if you are a true fan of a band, particularly one that writes their own stuff, you'll find that you'll appreciate their non-mainstream stuff on the albums, sometimes even more than what gets over-played on the radio. In fact, I suspect that many of these bands are complled to include those one or two mainstream songs on the album to keep their air time, but that much of what they consider their best artistic expression is among the "other" songs on the CD (just my opinion -- I don't have any facts or quotes to back it up).
Saying "there's only one good song on the CD" sounds like something my teenage little sister would say when she discovers that the latest 'NSync CD has several songs that don't sound like what she hears on the radio.
III was not much better than the other odds, if for no other reason than it totally ruined II (dramatically destroying the Enterprise does not in any way make up for screwing over Spock's noble self-sacrificial death in II). Let's go for a run-down here:
I: TMP (Tedious)
III: TSFS (Improbable and contrived, even for Sci-Fi. Trashed the very emotional ending in II, although the one shortcoming of II was that they had some foreshadowing that hinted they might try to pull this kind of stunt).
V: FF (Easily the worst of TOS movies)
VII: GEN (Takes the crown for bad Star Trek. If you're gonna kill Kirk, at least do it with something more dramatic than falling off of a rock. Also, how does a solid booster rocket make it to the sun in a matter of seconds?).
IX: INS (I have to admit, I at least laughed at the "floatation device" joke).
vs.
II: TWOK (Holy crap, I never grow tired of this. They should have quit right here while they were ahead).
IV: TVH (Save the whales? Hardly worthy of an even-numbered Star Trek, but I did get a kick out of it when I was a kid).
VI: TUC (The only reason it was excusable that they kept making movies after II. What could be better than quoting Shakespeare "in the original Klingon"?).
VIII: FC (The best of TNG movies, but honestly, it didn't have much competition).
Slashdot Mirror
How is the Supreme Court swayed by corporate dollars? Short of outright bribery, I am not aware of any vehicle for this. It's not like the justices have to run a re-election campaign in a couple of years. That's the whole point of appointing them for life. Once they're in, they don't owe anybody anything. They are already sitting on the highest court, so they don't have to impress anyone to get another appointment. They don't have to worry about re-election, so no need for financing a campaign. The justices really have no incentive to take a bribe. The prestige of sitting on the Supreme Court far outweighs such a temporary monetary gain, and the justice taking bribes would be quickly impeached once it was discovered. It's a totally brilliant arrangement: A small group of people with very limited power, but extrememly powerful within their limits. They have no original jurisdiction and no capacity to originate law, so they can't take the country by tyrrany, but once something hits their docket and they agree to hear it, their decisions are absolutely binding. There is no one else to appeal to. Since they are basically immune from any kind of external power, they can afford to vote against the most powerful politicians or corporations if they feel it is necessary (granted, they sometimes are swayed more by the potential for setting precedents than the actual merits of a specific case, but even in those cases, they decide to set or not set precdent according to their consciences). The whole point is to provide a final sanity check where the powerful can be stopped when abusing their power. I am no fan of the copyright extension, but if it is upheld, I do not doubt it will be because five of the justices really believe that was the right thing to do. Your smug comment about corporate dollars was ridiculous.
Yes, there was no formal declaration in 1990 for Iraq, but the circumstances were different too. In 1990, we were playing "Good Neighbor" and "World Citizen." Last September, we were hurting from a direct attack on us, we were pissed off, we weren't exactly in "turn the other cheek" mode, and we had the kind of solidarity (at least temporarily) that made conditions ripe for a war declaration. It would have passed both houses of Congress with little to no dissent because then the congress people would be able to say "See, we're doing something about it."
I know that it's pure speculation, but I offer it as my opinion that a war declaration would have served to galvanize our collective resolve, and would have kept it strong for a long time. For four years in WWII, everybody knew who the bad guys were, and we knew what we were trying to do (push them back into their own borders). People stood behind the effort through a long and difficult time (even the folks at home were living with rations). As it is now, we have an enemy that is difficult to even label, much less "contain" in any kind of border. All we know is that "they" (the terrorists) hate us and that we wouldn't mind killing "them" to the last man. But, since there's no nation to call the enemy, we're already bickering from within about "is this country one of "them" or not? I think everybody in Washington, D.C. would take a real country with a real declaration of war right now.
While it is true that no war has technically been declared, that is due more to the fact that there is no sovereign state to declare war against. If there were such a state, I do not doubt that a formal declaration of war would have been made around Sept. 12 (similar to what happened after Pearl Harbor). Even in the absence of a technical declaration of war, there is no doubt that we are presently in a time of war. There was plenty of evidence that Jose Padilla was giving "aid and comfort" to the enemy, which qualifies him as an enemy combatant. So, I hate to burst everybody's alarmist bubble, because, after all, this is Slashdot where the sheep mentality happens to be pro-Linux and anti-U.S. rather than the other way around, but unless you are using your P2P network as a means of actively distributing intelligence and training material to Al Qaeda operatives around the world, you are not going to get tossed into prison and held indefinitely for using the P2P client of the month. Maybe Hilary Rosen would like for it to be that way, but it would be political suicide for any congress person to support her, so it will never happen. As it is, even this bill that would allow RIAA members to DoS your P2P network is being met very critically.
If you decide to aid the enemy in a time of war, especially if there is abundant evidence that you are doing so, special rules apply. It's one of those short-term provisions that are necessary to successfully prosecute a war and keep Sept. 11 from repeating itself. Just like other such provisions in the past, this will pass once the war is over. I for one do not see why there is so much sympathy for Jose Padilla on Slashdot. He made himself an enemy of the very Constitution everybody here wants to say they love so much. If he had his way and his little extremist Muslim buddies took over, you wouldn't so much as have the right to complain about it on Slashdot.
But it's so clear. Imagine a Beowulf cluster...
I understand your idea about a proprietary interface on top of the Linux kernel. There are lots of proprietary programs for Linux, some of which sell in the tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars range and are anything but open. However, that still leaves the problem that having an OS based on the Linux kernel still makes it much easier for a third party to create a portability solution, and MS knows that portability is not their friend.
However, if OrCad wanted to just go ahead and port Capture, PSpice and Layout Plus to Linux, I have a, uh, friend who might use them, so I guess it wouldn't be too bad.
On a serious note, The MathWorks deserves kudos for having a fully featured version of Matlab available for Linux. Also, NI has a Linux version of LabVIEW, which is good for Q&D GUI design besides just instrumentation. So, even when there is no good open source competitor, some companies are starting to come around and port their stuff to Linux on their own.
No, it isn't.
I'd bet they've already ported all of their major software apps to various UNIX and LINUX variants just for research, and have probably rolled a LINUX distro or two just for grins. That doesn't mean any of it will ever see the light of day outside of Redmond.
Honestly, if people would take a peek at what the actual "news" is before getting all hot and bothered off the cuff because they saw the words "blocking" and "pornography" in the same sentence on Slashdot, they'd see this is not that big a deal. It just sounded nice and sensational because it involved censorship, WorldCom and porn, all in one story. If you read it though, Penn. ISPs have already similarly blocked some 200 other sites (I'm guessing voluntarily, since this is the first that has generated a court order), so it's really not even news at all. If WorldCom defied the order and had a big standoff with the Penn. AG, that might be news, but I can't see any evidence that will happen, or even that anybody suspects it will happen.
Or it could cause very little precedent to be set at all. WorldCom is not being punished or held liable for the content. They were simply told, "This content is illegal in Pennsylvania, so we are instructing you not to serve it to your Pennsylvania customers." If you don't like that move to another country, because child pornography has collected a strong body of precedent against itself. It is not constitutionally protected, so we should not be surprised to see it restricted. It would take a huge legal leap to go from this to "Shut down the homepage of the Democratic National Convention because they published an article critical of the President."
My wife taught 3rd grade, and she drilled those kids with the multiplication tables so hard that they were bleeding products by the end of the year. It was her first year teaching, and she was pissed that the previous teachers had taught the kids all of these stupid short-cuts and memory tricks. Her biggest pet peeve was "touch math." The kids learned to touch each number in certain places a certain number of times, so to add 5 + 7, they would touch the "5" five times and the "7" seven times as they counted up to 12. She was just about ready to quit when she had a girl up at the board and wrote "7 + 0" for the girl to solve. The girl proceeded to count to seven while she touched the "7" seven times, then stared at the "0," utterly confounded, and was unable to complete the problem. When she started teaching them multiplication, they tried to adapt touch math to that. To solve 2x3, they would touch the "2" twice, and then repeat three times. That's when she started giving them verbal quizzes almost daily, in which she would shoot off about 25 multiplication problems, and give the students approximately 3 seconds to solve each before moving on. They learned pretty fast that it's a lot easier to learn 7x9 = 63 than to try to touch the "7" seven times and repeat nine times in three seconds. She graded the quizzes and returned them too. When the kids realized they were sinking, most of them just got off of their lazy butts and learned their multiplication tables. It may seem harsh, but it's exactly what those kids needed. They had had lazy teachers before, and most of them came from homes where laziness was a way of life and education was not exactly a priority (this was a pretty poor school). There were a very few for whom the multiplication tables were genuinely beyond their mental capacity, and they will probably never know them, but most of them got it together and learned something.
This would be a brilliant random number generator for generating encryption keys like the article was talking about... until some evil genius figured out a diabolical way to spoof a computer into thinking it was some date/time other than the true date/time. Fortunately, I think that, technologically, we are a long, long way from that.
The problem with this solution, like any software solution, is its reliance on an external environment, which can be "loaded" one way or another. This is very bad for cryptography, because it means that your results can be manipulated. As has been said by others in this discussion, a software algorithm is by nature deterministic, so the same combination of inputs will always yield the same results. If you find a way to reproduce the inputs, then you can reproduce the results exactly. The other problem with this approach is that it relies on being able to "randomly" select a search engine, a web page and a word. Where do you get the random numbers you will need to decide which search engine, web page and word to use?
I see a lot of people treating acetaminophen and ibuprofen as the same in the comments. I'm no doctor, but just in my personal experience, I find ibuprofen vastly more effective for me. I believe that acetaminophen (Tylenol) is a pain blocker, where ibuprofen is more an anti-inflammatory. Since a lot of my headaches and other pains have to do with lack of sleep, tense nerves and sinus infection (I'm a student, work full time and have pretty harsh seasonal allergies), ibuprofen works wonders. I can feel the nerves relaxing after I take the stuff. Tylenol doesn't do much for me, though I hear it is more effective as an actual pain blocker. Of course, like I said before, IANAD.
Have accurate information before you correct somebody. The Kilogram is indeed the SI unit for mass. The "standard" is a metal cylinder (I forget which kind of metal) that weighs, by definition, exactly 1 Kg. Think about SI units. What's a Newton? A kg*m/s^2, not 1000 g*m/s^2. Sorry, you lose.
Saying "there's only one good song on the CD" sounds like something my teenage little sister would say when she discovers that the latest 'NSync CD has several songs that don't sound like what she hears on the radio.
Ummm, that was Gore (not Quayle). Get your goofy Vice Presidents straight.
III was not much better than the other odds, if for no other reason than it totally ruined II (dramatically destroying the Enterprise does not in any way make up for screwing over Spock's noble self-sacrificial death in II). Let's go for a run-down here:
I: TMP (Tedious)
III: TSFS (Improbable and contrived, even for Sci-Fi. Trashed the very emotional ending in II, although the one shortcoming of II was that they had some foreshadowing that hinted they might try to pull this kind of stunt).
V: FF (Easily the worst of TOS movies)
VII: GEN (Takes the crown for bad Star Trek. If you're gonna kill Kirk, at least do it with something more dramatic than falling off of a rock. Also, how does a solid booster rocket make it to the sun in a matter of seconds?).
IX: INS (I have to admit, I at least laughed at the "floatation device" joke).
vs.
II: TWOK (Holy crap, I never grow tired of this. They should have quit right here while they were ahead).
IV: TVH (Save the whales? Hardly worthy of an even-numbered Star Trek, but I did get a kick out of it when I was a kid).
VI: TUC (The only reason it was excusable that they kept making movies after II. What could be better than quoting Shakespeare "in the original Klingon"?).
VIII: FC (The best of TNG movies, but honestly, it didn't have much competition).